Lifestyle
My Top Five Tesla Motors Moments in 2014
Each year, Tesla seems to top the previous year with developments and breaking news, and 2014 was no different. Here’s my list of top Tesla Motors moments in 2014:
Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk discussing the footprint of the Gigafactory and its energy needs.
5 – Did you say a $5 Billion Gigafactory? In late March, Tesla announced that four states were in the running for the $5 billion Gigafactory that would produce up to 50-GW-h of battery packs per year and 35-GW-h of energy storage packs per year by 2020. Fast forward to later this year and JB Straubel, CTO, Tesla Motors, said “We’re a bit ahead of schedule in the Gigafactory than what we previously communicated. We felt it was important to go as fast as we possibly could and start some production operations in 2016.”
4 – So who won? I can’t leave you hanging, right? The winner of the Gigafactory sweepstakes was Reno, Nevada and it was announced in September 2014. The entire Nevada legislature voted to approve the land and tax incentives received by Tesla Motors. Of course, old media gnats took a swipe at the incentives that Tesla Motors received, based on the fact the company is only ten years old and not a bloated 20th century company, such as Boeing and Volkswagen.
Just this last year, VW received $230 million dollars from the state of Tennessee for plant expansion that creates 2,000 jobs, compared to the 5,000 jobs at the Gigafactory. Musk is big target. This is a great, “Inside Elon Musk’s 1.4 Gigafactory Score,” and it details the competition among states and Tesla Motor’s dealmaking approach.
3- Rising Tides Lifts All Boats, right? So how do you accelerate auto electrification in the industry? Just release your patents. That’s what Tesla Motors did on June 12, 2014 via the blog post, “All Our Patent Are Belong to You,” and it created a big Internet, social media and media buzz for weeks. During the summer, there was conjecture that BMW was talking with Elon Musk, but nothing came out of it.
So why did they do it? From Musk’s blog post: “At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.”
2- Against It! It can’t be a completely groovy list, right? Back in March, the state of New Jersey blocked Tesla Motors from selling its cars via a non-elected Commissioner board that announced its ruling on Monday morning (public debate ran from 10:37 – 11:15) and voted to approve the ban later that day… Democracy and free markets, not in New Jersey…Michigan…Missouri, Texas, but I digress. The greed freaks (the state dealer association) and their political minions in New Jersey made sure no Tesla Motors retail stores could exist. The “honorable” Governor Christie said there were no talks between the company and his office, and Christie felt it was an issue that the legislature could rectify.
1- All Things D The winner for 2014 is the “All Things D” event and announcement of the Model S P85D (all-wheel drive) that provides the Silicon Valley automaker a new market segment to reach in the coming years and compete with the BMW i8’s price range or higher-end Jaguars and BMW sedans and coupes. Musk tweeted and the Internet followed all the way to southern California, where many witnessed numerous 3.2 second 0 to 60 nighttime demonstrations and driver assist features. Just reported today, these new electric beasts are out on the road in southern California.
Runner ups: The Model X delays vehicle deliveries until 3rd quarter 2015 and on April 24, 2014 the company announced its 100th supercharger. Also, the cross country Tesla Motors trip was a fun 72 hours or so.
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Trying out the new superchargers located at Two Brothers Brewery, located in Aurora, IL, the 2nd largest city in Illinois.
**A favorite moment for this Model S driver was the installation of superchargers (photo right) at my favorite craft brewer the Chicago area, Two Brothers Brewery in Aurora.
So what will be the big Tesla Motors moment in 2015? A Model X surprise? Maybe Tesla sells more all-electric vehicles than Nissan’s Leaf? We will see.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
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Elon Musk escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”
The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”
Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.
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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
